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February 22 - March 16, 2019
Nelson would remember finding his father beating his mother, and lifting his father off of her long enough for her to run away, into the woods.
That he had convinced the neighbors that his wife’s complaints were the complaints of an insane person. Even when he broke a broom over her head, he could convince others that he really loved her.
She got her man, she has him roped His tongue hangs out as though he’s choked She’s sorta scared, her hair’s a wreck She has her foot right on his neck Dames get desperate in times like these When men are scarce and hard to please
As the winter of 1937 set in, she told the children who were still living at home that she loved them and would send for them. She gave the older children instructions to take care of the younger ones, and she told them to always look out for each other. And then she slipped away.
she has worn out two pairs of shoes but none of her enthusiasm. “I’m a great lover of the outdoors,” she explained.
She had slipped away to come west, a journey most of her family had made years before. Her mother and a brother were in California, and a sister had a place in Santa Ana—and an extra bed. She had relayed that it would be no bother to have a houseguest until things settled down in Gallia County.
A few minutes later they pulled up at a hotel and Emma got a room for the night for two dollars. She soaked her feet in a bath and walked down the street to Sally’s Restaurant for a sandwich. Someone there told her she needed to meet Ralph Leh and the waitress, Sally, got him on the phone.
Agony Grind, known to make grown men say embarrassing things. Emma, on a bum leg, would later write in her diary that it was a “pretty hard and rocky piece of trail.”
On one of their flower hunts near Possum Hollow, a gentle rain was falling, washing the woodlands, and they found a large, moss-covered boulder protruding from the earth, covered with delicate hepaticas. It was a sight they’d never forget. Emma would later write that her husband beat her beyond recognition ten times that year.
She had never dreamed she would get to walk across the Hudson River on a bridge, but step-by-step she went as cars blurred by. She stopped in the middle, suspended between the water and the sky, to behold the sights. Downriver was New York City, and to the north was the United States Military Academy at West Point, where monuments to dead soldiers dotted the manicured grounds. It was here, during the Revolutionary War, that colonists stretched a giant chain across the Hudson to stop British ships from traveling upriver.
Emma didn’t dispute the claims. She looked around, then left, and jotted her feelings later in her diary. “Some things there were fakes, I am sure,” she wrote.
The same was true for the stranger in the tiny town of Amesville, Connecticut, who woke at Eva Bates’s house a little before six o’clock, slung her bag on her shoulder, and rejoined the Appalachian Trail. Emma walked until she came to a low, swampy stretch in the woods, where the mosquitoes rose from the earth in thick clouds. She slapped at them a few times and then hurried to higher ground, where she stopped to thin them out.
Here came another sojourner, more than a century later, this time a woman with the wind at her back, summiting Greylock at noon and finding a mountaintop restaurant where she sat to enjoy a hamburger, a glass of milk, and, for dessert, a bowl of ice cream, before making her descent toward North Adams and bedding down in the wild beside the trail, completely comfortable.
The headline in the New York Times read, CONNIE BLOWS NORTH WITH FORCE EQUAL TO THOUSANDS OF H-BOMBS.
Emma enjoyed their company, though she was surprised to see them on the trail. She read the newspapers every day, so she was well aware of the tension between the races in 1955, when one in ten US citizens was black.
She would not allow them to utter racial epithets and taught them to treat people as they wished to be treated themselves. One experience on the trail defined this attitude: An African American couple invited her to dinner, and when she was seated and served, they withdrew. She refused to eat unless they joined her, and she seemed embarrassed by their treatment.
in the Green Mountains of Vermont, an old white woman fell asleep under the arm of a young black man from Harlem.
Emma was often seen in the woods in advance of her journey. Her children would learn that she secretly made overnight expeditions to the wilderness to determine what equipment was completely necessary, what foods were lightweight and would help her maintain energy, and what first-aid supplies she might need in an emergency.
She logged the experience in her diary, adding: “The boys, all but one colored, were very nice.”
In hopes of brokering peace between the two largest rival gangs, the church I worked for had me take the four top honchos of each gang for a week-long hike along the Appalachian Trail in Vermont.
nor her unease at living in close proximity to eight young black males, her distress leading all eight to bestow on her their stoniest stares.
Why are you doing this? Just for the heck of it, she said.
touching a sign that said APPALACHIAN TRAIL. Below the photograph was another headline: GRANDMA WALKS APPALACHIAN TRAIL FOR “THE HECK OF IT”
Any one of the answers could stand on its own, but viewed collectively, the diversity of responses left her motivation open to interpretation, as though she wanted people to seek out their own conclusions, if there were any to be made. Maybe each answer was honest. Maybe she was trying to articulate that exploring the world was a good way to explore her own mind.
They ate lunch at a shelter on Elephant Mountain, then hiked on, and though the trail was covered with blowdowns and obstacles, they all had an enjoyable day, putting in about ten miles.
I thought it would be a nice lark. It wasn’t. There were terrible blowdowns, burnt-over areas that were never re-marked, gravel and sand washouts, weeds and brush to your neck, and most of the shelters were blown down, burned down, or so filthy I chose to sleep out of doors. This is no trail.
This is a nightmare. For some fool reason they always lead you right up over the biggest rock to the top of the biggest mountain they can find.
A path is a prior interpretation of the best way to traverse a landscape, and to follow a route is to accept an interpretation, or to stalk your predecessors on it as scholars and trackers and pilgrims do. To walk the same way is to reiterate something deep; to move through the same space the same way is a means of becoming the same person, thinking the same thoughts.
Besides the dungarees and long-sleeved button-up she was wearing, she brought along every scrap of clothing she found in her bag. A T-shirt, a men’s heavy wool pullover sweater, a satin-lined wool jacket, and a raincoat.
Emma told a reporter that she had found “an aloneness more complete than ever.”
she scratched out a postcard, addressed it to a Roman Catholic parish in Harlem and dropped it in the mail, still unaware that she’d stayed the night with the leaders of two rival street gangs.
“Knowing of her experience through all sections of the Trail, I asked her which part she liked best. ‘Going downhill, Sonny,’ she replied.”
She added distance to her total tally until she had walked more than fourteen thousand miles, more than halfway around the earth, putting her in the slim company of astonishing pedestrians.
